Tag - thesis

I just uploaded my PhD thesis
entitled A Distributed Music Information System, which I defended on the
22nd of January. My examiners were David de Roure from University of
Southampton and Nicolas
Gold from King's College. My PhD supervisor was Mark Sandler.

Here is the abstract:

Information management is an important part of music technologies today,
covering the man- agement of public and personal collections, the construction
of large editorial databases and the storage of music analysis results. The
information management solutions that have emerged for these use-cases are
still isolated from each other. The information one of these solutions manages
does not benefit from the information another holds.

In this thesis, we develop a distributed music information system that aims
at gathering music- related information held by multiple databases or
applications. To this end, we use Semantic Web technologies to create a unified
information environment. Web identifiers correspond to any items in the music
domain: performance, artist, musical work, etc. These web identifiers have
structured representations permitting sophisticated reuse by applications, and
these representations can quote other web identifiers leading to more
information.

We develop a formal ontology for the music domain. This ontology allows us
to publish and interlink a wide range of structured music-related data on the
Web. We develop an ontology evaluation methodology and use it to evaluate our
music ontology. We develop a knowledge representation framework for combining
structured web data and analysis tools to derive more information. We apply
these different technologies to publish a large amount of pre-existing
music-related datasets on the Web. We develop an algorithm to automatically
relate such datasets among each other. We create automated music-related
Semantic Web agents, able to aggregate musical resources, structured web data
and music processing tools to derive and publish new information. Finally, we
describe three of our applications using this distributed information
environment. These applications deal with personal collection management,
enhanced access to large audio streams available on the Web and music
recommendation.

So far, just a PDF is available, as I am still fighting with LaTeX2HTML, but
there will be an HTML version some time soon :-) I am also planning to upload,
at the same place, some extra annexes and extra results I didn't include in the
main document. I think I will also blog here about some of the things included
in this thesis.

In case you just want to jump to a particular chapter, I will just give some
keywords to the different thesis chapters below: